LU is focused guiding for seeing there is no real, inherent 'self' - what do you understand by this?
That the sense I have of a doer living behind my eyes and managing my life is an illusion, a habit developed by the thinking mind, and the cause of my suffering.
What are you looking for at LU?
Connection with others who have been drawn to this realisation, support and guidance to remain awake and motivation to continue coming home to the truth. I am aware that years of conditioning might not simply stay unraveled without a fight,
What do you expect from a guided conversation?
Pointers and reminders from a more experienced seeker, who knows the common traps and pitfalls and can shed light on the darkness. I respond well to encouragement and humorous delivery, trying to not take my no self too seriously!
What is your experience in terms of spiritual practices, seeking and inquiry?
Regular meditation in the dzogchen and mahamudra style for the last year, avid reader/listener of Sam Harris, Loch Kelly, Adyashanti and others. Self inquiry through 12 step and Recovery Dharma groups.
On a scale from 1 to 10, how willing are you to question any currently held beliefs about 'self?
11
Not all who wander are lost, but all who wonder cannot be found
Re: Not all who wander are lost, but all who wonder cannot be found
Hello Mister E,
I'm Albert and I would like to be your guide.
First I have a few guidelines I'd like us to agree on.
1. Please answer all the questions I ask. I will colour them blue for clarity.
Also, please use the quote function to respond to these questions, so that the thread remains easy to read.
2. Please try to answer within 2 or 3 days at most. If this becomes difficult, please let me know. This is not to place pressure, simply to keep things moving and focused.
3. If I don't hear from you for a week I will engage with another applicant, as there are currently not enough guides to assist everyone.
4. Be honest.
I am pleased to introduce myself and begin working with you.
To begin, how would you like to be addressed?
What is this experience? Does it have a quality of pressure, temperature, colour, or any other sensory qualities?
Please take a moment to really check with your senses, and describe the experience.
This is a good place to start!
I'm looking forward to our conversation together.
Best wishes,
Albert.
I'm Albert and I would like to be your guide.
First I have a few guidelines I'd like us to agree on.
1. Please answer all the questions I ask. I will colour them blue for clarity.
Also, please use the quote function to respond to these questions, so that the thread remains easy to read.
2. Please try to answer within 2 or 3 days at most. If this becomes difficult, please let me know. This is not to place pressure, simply to keep things moving and focused.
3. If I don't hear from you for a week I will engage with another applicant, as there are currently not enough guides to assist everyone.
4. Be honest.
I am pleased to introduce myself and begin working with you.
To begin, how would you like to be addressed?
the sense I have of a doer living behind my eyes and managing my life
What is this experience? Does it have a quality of pressure, temperature, colour, or any other sensory qualities?
Please take a moment to really check with your senses, and describe the experience.
This is a good place to start!
I'm looking forward to our conversation together.
Best wishes,
Albert.
Re: Not all who wander are lost, but all who wonder cannot be found
Hi Albert,
Thank you for you offer of help in guiding me!
Thanks for your time!
Ben
Thank you for you offer of help in guiding me!
My name is Ben, and I'm happy to be addressed by my flesh sack label ;)how would you like to be addressed?
When I feel identified as this doer "me" and check in with the sensory experience of it, there does seem to be a bit of pressure around my eyes and forehead, combined with a slight warmth and vibration. I don't notice any colour or other sensory qualities. I also found this process of checking in with it actually seemed to cause a bit of a dissolving of the doer sense and some relief and freedom from it. I don't know if there is an element of intellectually tricking myself through this "looking", but even if that is the case it is nonetheless a useful reminder and pointing out of the no self realisation that I have had glimpses of yet struggle to remain in for longer periods of time...What is this experience? Does it have a quality of pressure, temperature, colour, or any other sensory qualities?
Please take a moment to really check with your senses, and describe the experience.
Thanks for your time!
Ben
-
Florisness
- Posts: 672
- Joined: Mon Mar 28, 2016 11:51 pm
Re: Not all who wander are lost, but all who wonder cannot be found
Hi Ben,
I'm sorry to see your guidance didn't proceed. I've been scrolling through some of the pages on 'the gate' in which the threads are located to see if there are some conversations that didn't take off. It seems that yours is one of those. Maybe that happened because Hawthorn didn't turn the notifications on. I can proceed with you if you wish. I'm not sure if you'll still respond, so I just copied-pasted an exercise for in case you still come online and then we could start right away:
Dream analogy
I use the following story more times, so I copied-pasted it so that I don't have to write it over and over. I wrote this for a man once, and so if you're a woman, please reverse the sexes in the following story. In that case, you'd imagine that you're dreaming being a man and not a woman. I only worked your name in the story at the end, to make it a little more convincing :-).
Could you imagine that tonight you're going to bed and dream that you're a woman in that dream. I say woman, because I've imaged you identify as a man, and want to create a little contrast. Please imagine what that could look like for a second. Try to imagine it very vividly, like a first-person view (so it's not like you see the backside of the body, but rather that you're looking through the eyes) and just like it is happening in your real time/present time. No need to spend a lot of time at it, just a moment will do. Okay, so when you've imaged that, you can proceed reading. I asked you to imagine this, because in our language we often say things like 'I am this, I am that, etc.' and I would like you to get an idea of what 'being something' in our language actually refers to. What experiences did you imagining being there, in order that you'd say 'I'm a woman'? I can imagine you could have imagined feeling a little different, that there might be a different self-image and thoughts of a past, maybe the voice would be more feminine sounding than usual, maybe you sometimes see a womanhand or so in your visual field. Frankly, I could imagine that the self-image/past thoughts actually contributed most to the idea/sense of being a woman, what do you think? In any case, of whatever you imaged, or could imagine, you might agree that of all the things you imaged to create a woman in your imagination, could be called like a sort of 'womanness'. But.. was there an actual woman there? Did the things you associate with 'being a woman', the womanness, constitute an actual entity that could be called a woman? Perhaps you agree that that is not true, because you could for example change the dream so that you'd now refer to it as being a horse or so, and no actual woman died there. There might have been what we call womanness, but not an actual woman, right? So we may use language to say things like 'I was a woman in my dream', and it is fine if we keep using language like that, but it's not the truth of the matter, right? Okay, so why this exercise, why is this significant? Well, because isn't what you're experiencing right now, what people sometimes refer to as reality, or waking life, not just the same situation as the dream? I asked you to imagine that you were dreaming, and frankly of course you weren't even really dreaming, but I could just have well asked if you could imagine that your experience right now was just transforming like you're becoming a woman. The experience is the same either way, either if you call it dream or waking life or whatever. So.. now in your present experience there might be a voice, certain feelings, thoughts, perceptions that you might associated with being a man, and even more so with being a biological entity, a self, a person, a you, but not an actual entity as such, is there? Perhaps we could say there is a sort of Benness to the experience, but without an actual Ben?
Wishing you well,
Floris
I'm sorry to see your guidance didn't proceed. I've been scrolling through some of the pages on 'the gate' in which the threads are located to see if there are some conversations that didn't take off. It seems that yours is one of those. Maybe that happened because Hawthorn didn't turn the notifications on. I can proceed with you if you wish. I'm not sure if you'll still respond, so I just copied-pasted an exercise for in case you still come online and then we could start right away:
Dream analogy
I use the following story more times, so I copied-pasted it so that I don't have to write it over and over. I wrote this for a man once, and so if you're a woman, please reverse the sexes in the following story. In that case, you'd imagine that you're dreaming being a man and not a woman. I only worked your name in the story at the end, to make it a little more convincing :-).
Could you imagine that tonight you're going to bed and dream that you're a woman in that dream. I say woman, because I've imaged you identify as a man, and want to create a little contrast. Please imagine what that could look like for a second. Try to imagine it very vividly, like a first-person view (so it's not like you see the backside of the body, but rather that you're looking through the eyes) and just like it is happening in your real time/present time. No need to spend a lot of time at it, just a moment will do. Okay, so when you've imaged that, you can proceed reading. I asked you to imagine this, because in our language we often say things like 'I am this, I am that, etc.' and I would like you to get an idea of what 'being something' in our language actually refers to. What experiences did you imagining being there, in order that you'd say 'I'm a woman'? I can imagine you could have imagined feeling a little different, that there might be a different self-image and thoughts of a past, maybe the voice would be more feminine sounding than usual, maybe you sometimes see a womanhand or so in your visual field. Frankly, I could imagine that the self-image/past thoughts actually contributed most to the idea/sense of being a woman, what do you think? In any case, of whatever you imaged, or could imagine, you might agree that of all the things you imaged to create a woman in your imagination, could be called like a sort of 'womanness'. But.. was there an actual woman there? Did the things you associate with 'being a woman', the womanness, constitute an actual entity that could be called a woman? Perhaps you agree that that is not true, because you could for example change the dream so that you'd now refer to it as being a horse or so, and no actual woman died there. There might have been what we call womanness, but not an actual woman, right? So we may use language to say things like 'I was a woman in my dream', and it is fine if we keep using language like that, but it's not the truth of the matter, right? Okay, so why this exercise, why is this significant? Well, because isn't what you're experiencing right now, what people sometimes refer to as reality, or waking life, not just the same situation as the dream? I asked you to imagine that you were dreaming, and frankly of course you weren't even really dreaming, but I could just have well asked if you could imagine that your experience right now was just transforming like you're becoming a woman. The experience is the same either way, either if you call it dream or waking life or whatever. So.. now in your present experience there might be a voice, certain feelings, thoughts, perceptions that you might associated with being a man, and even more so with being a biological entity, a self, a person, a you, but not an actual entity as such, is there? Perhaps we could say there is a sort of Benness to the experience, but without an actual Ben?
Wishing you well,
Floris
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